In March of 1961, 35 year old Allen Ginsberg, the acclaimed poet of the Beat Generation, left the United States on an extended travel agenda that would eventually take him to India by February, 1962. He spent the next fifteen months traveling throughout India and a few close by countries, returning to the United States in July of 1963 through Japan to Vancouver then home.

Six months prior to his departure from India, sometime after midnight December 11, 1962, Ginsberg boarded the Doon Express at the Howran Station in Calcutta headed toward Benares. Standing on the platform and waiting to the last second to get on the train before it pulled away, Ginsberg squeezed out every moment of time he could bidding adieu to a young woman ten years his junior he had been crossing paths with on-and-off over the years since his early days as a struggling poet in New York. After the train station goodbyes neither Ginsberg nor any of his ragged band of Beat Generation followers would ever see her again, she apparently disappearing into the hinterlands and milieu of the sub-continent and lands beyond.

The young woman on the platform was Hope Savage, a magnetically charismatic and fabulously beautiful American said by those around Ginsberg to be the onetime girlfriend and love of his life of Gregory Corso, a major member of the Ginsberg coterie.

Savage had shown up to become a member of that same inner circle sometime around mid 1955 after having listened to the suggestion of David Madden, a man who had absolutely no connection with Ginsberg and/or the Beat Generation, but who would eventually become the author of at least eleven books. Madden and Savage met early in the year 1954 when he was 21 stationed in the Army at Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina. She was age 17 from Camden, located some 35 miles from the base.

Madden was the person who was literally responsible for plugging in the spotlight and flipping the switch that illuminated Savage in the center stage of the Beat Generation. Before meeting Savage, in the few short years that transpired after graduating from high school, Madden had attended the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, been in the Merchant Marine, and in 1953, rather than waiting to be drafted, volunteered for induction. Savage had dropped out of high school and pursuing her education in her own fashion, studying in libraries and on college campuses which, each in their own way, put the two of them together at the same time at the same place.

Madden's above so mentioned educational background and experience set him head and shoulders above the typical run of the mill GI that for a 100 miles in any direction around the army base scrounged for every available and maybe not so available female to stick the bone to. It also put him and an Army buddy, who had gone to Harvard, into the right interest mind-set to attend an avant-garde movie being shown in the auditorium at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. They noticed a young girl a few rows in front of them and several seats over, a girl Madden would later describe as having never seen anyone more beautiful. Waiting for the movie to start he and his buddy talked back and forth how neither of them would ever have a chance with a girl that looked like her. While the film was being shown, in the dark, unbeknownst to either of the two GIs, the girl that was so much their center of attention got up and moved to the seat right next to Madden. In the book The Blue Hand: The Beats In India (2008) by Debora Baker, in an interview with Madden, speaking of Savage writes:

"It was not just the beauty of her face that transfixed him. Her skin was the purest, palest and almost unearthly whiteness. At the time most girls kept their hair closely styled. Yet hers was so long and so lovely, it reminded him of the print he'd seen once of Botticelli's naked Venus emerging from a clam."

Then Baker goes on to quote him as saying:

"(It) didn't take long to figure that there was more to her than beauty. She made the move, he decided, because she was lonely and they looked interesting. What she wanted, he saw right away, was to talk to someone who was likely to understand her, someone conversant, it developed, with the Greek plays and the poetry of Swinburne, Shelly, Keats, and Blake."

During the less than a year period that elapsed between the time Madden and Hope Savage first met he suggested, then hard-core encouraged her to go to New York, most particularly Greenwich Village, telling her she would find a richer and more indepth environment more closely suited to her longings than she could ever find in South Carolina. Much to his chagrin she did. As it was, just about the same time, he was reassigned and shipped out, spending his last year in Alaska. In 1956, after receiving an early out, he married a woman he met while pursing completion of his B.A., albeit all along maintaining a continuing friendship with Savage as well as he could, at least via mail.

Before Savage showed up in New York the aforementioned Gregory Corso had left, having moved to Cambridge becoming a quasi poet in residence at Harvard, mostly supported by a group of students that were enamored with his street-wise ways. In a letter from Corso to Ginsberg in San Francisco dated August 23, 1956 and published in An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso (2003) he tells Ginsberg in so many words that in June 1955, after leaving Harvard, he met, referring to Hope Savage, a beautiful female Shelley. Corso, who would have been age 25 at the time of his meeting with Savage, goes on to say:

"(She) dug me and gave me a place to live and has been with me up till a month ago when I decided that I wanted to go to California. She went back home and expects to join me soon. She sends me money and delightful letters and I love her very much. Was she, who taught me. She has fantastic memory, only nineteen, can recite and feel all of Shelley, yes all, Prometheus [Unbound], Alastor, [The] Revolt of Islam, and also fifty stanzas of Swinburne's The Triumph of Time-but more! She is going to kill herself on her twentieth year. She planned her death two years ago. The year that I lived with her was all her ... she'd lock herself in a room and would walk up and down up and down ... spoke to no one but her Gregory ... weep, she'd weep and weep ... I can't really inform you about her, but I tell you she is the greatest person I've ever met, and if ever you meet her, I doubt if you'd disagree. Her name is Hope Savage."

In August 1956, in the letter he sent Ginsberg, Corso told Ginsberg he met Savage in June 1955 after leaving Harvard. He says she had been with him 'up till a month ago', meaning roughly July 1956. That basically plays out the two of them being together a year. He then headed west to be with Ginsberg ending up in Mexico City. Savage arranged for a plane ticket back to the states, but shortly after that she headed toward Paris, later unable to be located by Corso when he traveled there in search of her.

In the same letter, which is not shown in the above quote, Corso writes both briefly and cryptically that Savage was with Anton when they met. Apparently after he left Harvard he returned to his old haunts in New York because the Anton he speaks of is Anton Rosenberg, the epitome of understated cool, probably the most notorious, coolest, hip dude in all of Greenwich Village and beyond.(see) How it was that Savage was with Rosenberg is not known, but it is known Corso and Rosenberg were friends, so it wouldn't be unusual that the two of them would cross paths.

In April of 1960, some two years before her train station goodbyes with Ginsberg, Savage, on the cusp of age of 24, was in Delhi after nearly five years traveling throughout Europe, Afghanistan Ceylon, Nepal and India following her initial arrival in Paris. She was in Dehli in an effort to implement her next contemplated move. In the ephemeral search of her continuing odyssey she had finally set sights on the kingdom of Bhutan, isolated and tucked away between India and China along the rugged south sloping reaches of the Himalayas. In her attempt to cross into Bhutan she discovered it was practically impossible without prior arrangements, being turned back at the border and told to go to Darjeeling for the proper papers. In Darjeeling she was told she would have to go to Delhi, a one-way trip of 1000 miles, which she did. If she ever received the proper papers or ever went into Bhutan legally or illegally is not known, but if she did, either way she didn't stay because two and a half years later, as stated in the opening paragraphs above, she ended up in Calcutta having caught up with Ginsberg somehow.

In a review of Baker's book in American Scholar titled Enlightenment Lite, Sudip Bose writes of Ginsberg's travels in India:

"(Ginsberg and Orlovsky's) journey became one endless high, as they indulged every day in morphine, opium, ganja, bhang, or the psychedelic pills that Ginsberg carried around in his backpack 'like radiant isotopes.' When they met up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger in Delhi, Ginsberg and Orlovsky were 'high as kites,' having 'managed to score some morphine after less than a week' in the city."

How long Savage had been traveling with Ginsberg in India is not totally clear, however, long or short, but mostly short, Ginsberg's continuing over the top self indulgent actions --- and those done similarly by others, i.e., heroin and such --- is one of the reasons she had grown so deeply disgruntled with everything.

However, if she herself was a total angel, she wasn't being viewed as such by Indian authorities. On December 10, 1962, the day before Ginsberg left Calcutta and the two of them said their goodbyes, Indian authorities had handed Savage an expulsion notice, accusing her of immorality and giving her just ten days to leave the country. After that most people that follow her agree she disappears from the grid, albeit, a few reports regarding her whereabouts have surfaced on-and-off. Some point to her being seen in Beirut, Lebanon sometime in 1970-71 and traveling with two children, both girls and believed to be hers, the oldest around 2 years of age. Another report jumps to 1975-76 with her being seen in Iran, Pakistan, Nepal, again with 'two toddler daughters.'

Kids or no, Hope Savage does have family, being one of seven children of Henry Savage, Jr (1903-1990). Her younger brother, Samuel P. Savage (1940 - 2019) of Wisconsin is an author of several successful books. In the early years, in a general fashion, prior to her travels she contacted him on and off, in later years, during her more extensive travels, he is, in his own hand, on record as saying he had never written or received a letter of any kind from her.[1]

Somewhat short of two years after Indian authorities were attempting to expel Hope Savage from their country and she was seeing Allen Ginsberg for the last time, as well as few years after trying to get into Bhutan. but before any 1970 having kids reports of Savage, true or not, surfaced --- found me some 750 miles southeast of Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal and Burma in the then wide-open drug infested railhead city of Chiang Mai, located in the far northern reaches of Thailand.

After meeting a Buddhist monk in the city from China, the two of us left on foot traveling north high into the mountains through Laos, Burma, and on into the mountainous regions nobody knows who they belong to, basically retracing the steps of the ancient Chamadao, the Tea Horse Road. After days and days of walking, of which all or most of the particulars are fully articulated in Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery, we ended up going our separate ways, he turning toward wherever he was going, me being left outside the gates of a remote, ancient, dilapidated Zen monastery --- a dilapidated monastery perched precariously high up on the side of some steep Chinese mountain situated somewhere along the southern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.[2]

With no formal access to the monastery apparently forthcoming, one day I followed some monks into the fields. When they returned, I returned, entering the monastery right along with them.
After hulking in the corner and eating scraps off the ground tossed to me over a period of days I woke up one morning to find a halfway decent pile of folded clothes sitting in front of me. I cleaned myself up, put on the clothes and was pointed to work in the kitchen food preparation area doing clean up and more or less garbage and latrine detail. Soon, as I got some sense of my surroundings, I began sneaking in and sitting in meditation in the main hall with the rest of the monks. Eventually, falling into and following the strict monastery rules and schedule as mandated by tradition over the centuries. Nobody said anything and nobody questioned why I was there. Not even the master. Months went by and I continued to sit in study-practice.

One day a very old and ancient man came down from the mountains and apparently asked to see the white monk who was said to be under the protection of the Lord Buddha. I was quickly brought before his presence. Because of respect paid him by all, plus the serenity he seemed to abide in, it was clear the man was Enlightened. Even so, no sooner had I arrived when a look of disappointment seemed to cross his face. As he turned to walk away, in a flash he swung back around with his staff swinging toward me. As I raised my arm to block the blow just as quickly he lowered the motion of the swing and before I was able to counter the move he had knocked me off my feet. Huge roars of laughter permeated the room. Here was this billion year old man who had easily knocked me to the ground and I know he must have been saying to everybody's enjoyment, "under the protection of Lord Buddha, my ass!" He extended the end of his staff to pull me up, which I took. He then strode out of the monastery and back into the mountains.

There was something about the old man that would not just let go and it continued to nag at me for the longest time. Months went by. Finally, when the weather turned such that I could, I sought the old man out, visiting him at what was not much more than a stone-pile hut along the edge of a stream. This time when I came before his presence there were no swinging staffs, only a sweeping open-palm hand offering me to join him for tea. Several days went by and during that time not one word passed between us.

Going to and from his abode was a very arduous several day trek, much of it through rugged and steep very high altitude territory. A good portion of the trail followed along side a series of streams that may or may not have been the same one, that was sometimes rushing and other times placid depending on the steepness or flatness of the terrain.[3]

On the second day out returning from the Zen man's abode I suddenly came upon a person with their back to me kneeling with a wooden stave bucket scooping water from the stream. There was some distance, maybe 30 feet, between the path where it was elevated several feet above the stream and the stream itself. Except for the Zen man, in all the time since I had left the monastery proper I had not seen a living soul, at least anyway, since I had entered the steep mountains. Coming across someone set me aback, especially someone with a wooden bucket. The last thing a person merely traversing through the area would need to be carrying with them would be a heavy full size wooden bucket, meaning to me possibly someone more permanent in some fashion. When I walked down toward the stream and about half way between the path and the stream announced my presence, the person, startled, let slip the bucket into the downstream flow. At that moment, turning toward me I could see the person was a woman. From my position off the trail and closeness to the stream I was able to quickly stop and retrieve the bucket, but after doing so and turning back, the woman was gone.

Besides the initial setback coming across a person in the first place, what was really nearly incomprehensible besides the fact that the person was a woman was that she was not of indigenous stock, but instead, in the quick glimpse I got of her, appeared Caucasian. I don't know how long it had been since I had seen another Caucasian, especially so a woman, and blue eyes. It had been so long I had actually forgot they existed.

Thinking she must have needed the water I scooped the bucket full and set it in the middle of the trail taking a position on the continuing up-rising side above the path and just sat there waiting. Even though I was at a high altitude and it was generally cold because of it, it was still at the warmer time of year, so dressed in right clothes as I was, sitting in the direct rays of the sun, relatively speaking you could get warm. In doing so, as the wait for the woman to return for her bucket began to lengthen, I began to get drowsy, closing my eyes now and then until I was actually napping. As soon as I discovered I had fallen asleep I jumped up, but in that short time the bucket was gone.

With the little bit of light remaining before sunset I knew I wouldn't be able to make it very far down the trail before night set in, and for sure I knew I wasn't about to try and traverse the trail in the dark. So said, I decided to find a place close by the trail sheltered from the wind and hole up for the night, hoping for a fresh start in the morning and possibly a return by the woman.

After scrounging along the edge of the stream for something edible together with some bread I had been carrying with me since leaving the monastery I ate and settled in for the night. As I sat there in the very last of the waning twilight, sheltered from the wind just off the trail, I remembered that on a couple of occasions I had gone into the village some distance down and below the monastery with several of the monks. On one of those occasions a man in the village who had a rudimentary use of English had tried to tell me something I wasn't getting the full grasp of. He signed me to wait while he went to get something, returning with a well worn magazine, possibly German or Dutch, and pointed to pictures of the women in the advertisements. What he was trying to say, showing his hands with his fingers up and counting, that 8 to 10 --- what I determined to be months before, and even then possibly more or less --- a western woman had come to the village. When I asked what happened to her he pointed toward the mountains. At the time I didn't quite know what to make of it and for the most part quickly forgot it --- that is until that night sitting there and I began wondering if there wasn't an element of truth to it.

The next morning just as I was waking and trying to shake off the morning chill as well as get the kinks out after a night of sleeping on rocks and hard ground, I looked down toward the trail and saw the woman standing there looking at me. This time rather than disappearing she gestured for me to join her. She had made a small fire and was in the process of making hot tea, a truly welcome delight. She apologized for her behavior the day before saying she was so shocked to see anyone, let alone a white man, she sort of lost it.

She said her name was Hope Savage, and after learning I was an American, told me that she was from South Carolina. She also said she had stayed at a village for a few days months back many miles down the mountain trail but wasn't aware of any monastery. She had seen what looked like ruins of what may have been a monastery at one time but didn't seem Inhibited from the distance she saw it. Wanting to stay away from any religious context or involvement she said she kept her distance. I asked her about the wooden stave bucket and she said she had a small cabin not far she thought might be used as a retreat of some kind. She said it had a roof, a door and a place for an inside fire, so it was warm and comfortable and we could go there if I liked. Which we did. So too, when I asked, she had not seen the Zen man, although she said she had been left stuff on occasion, but didn't know from who. Her not having made contact with the monastery meant she had not passed through the monastery portals to the outside we were in, so I wasn't sure if the two of us were operating on the same time frame reference, which could mean, but not necessarily so since I wasn't versed in such things, that her year and my year, if I had a year, were two totally different times. Both having never passed through or outside the portal at the same time, yes. One outside, the other not, yet still meeting, not sure. But for me at the moment it didn't matter because I found it exhilarating to talk with someone who knew English and having come from a similar enough background we could both share the conversation.[4]

We spent the rest of that whole day into the night together, then the next day and night before parting the morning of following day. Most of what has been alluded to in the main text above, that is Paris, India, Bhutan all ring true. How long she was going to stay and continue doing what she was doing she wouldn't say, although she seemed to think it wouldn't be long before she moved on, primarily because how harsh the conditions were. She did seem like she would not be willing to endure another winter there, at least that high up in the mountains. She seemed thoroughly interested in the fact that I had arrived in the general location by coming up through Thailand, Laos and Burma and indicated that might be a return prospect for her. She wasn't clear on any passports or visas or if any of them were valid. I think, like me, nobody knew she was there. She also expressed interest in seeing why the two of us held such differing views about the monastery. We parted company the morning of that third day and I never saw her again.[5]

When Hope Savage and I met that morning for the very first time along the trail and she told me her that her name was Hope Savage and that she was an American from South Carolina, none of it, relative to her, carrying any special meaning to me beyond the moment. That is to say, up to that time in my life I had never heard of a Hope Savage, that she existed, who she was, how she fit into the hierarchy of the Beat Movement, or that she was even associated with or a member of the Beat Movement. I would be hard pressed to say that at the time, unless you were part of the immediate inner circle of that movement, nobody, including me, would have. I'm not sure if she even knew. When it came up, either by me or through comments that led to it by her that I knew Bob Kaufman and had met Jack Kerouac, it became clear in her responses and the direction of our conversation that she was more than just familiar with the Beat movement. Even though I heard Ginsberg read "Howl" one night at the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach didn't mean I was somehow deeply involved in the Beat movement, so I saw no reason for it to be not much different for her. Nor, do I recall her specifically offering anything at the time that would have modified such an assumption.

So said, almost everything related to Hope Savage as it applies to the two of us has since been overlaid with information as to who she was or how she fit in relative to Corso, Ginsberg, et al, only done so after the fact. What people knew of her then was more-or-less individually held information done so by a half a dozen to maybe eight or so people traveling or scattered around in widespread and unrelated habitats. It wasn't until that information was gathered together in aggregate that a more singular, comprehensive picture formed. Otherwise, in a larger perspective, except possibly for one thing when I first met her that morning, I perceived her as being not much more or much different than any number of earlier seekers such as Mercedes De Acosta, Guy Hague, William Samuel and the spiritual traveler given the name Larry Darrell by W. Somerset Maugham in his novel The Razor's Edge, who had gone to India searching for or hoping to find an answer and perhaps even Enlightenment.

The one thing that truly impressed me as different from the others, different as well as it related to later seemingly higher profile seekers along the path such as Bhagavan Das and Steve Jobs, was how far or deep Hope had explored both into her spiritual self and penetrated the physical environment. Except for Darrell, most of the early seekers and those that followed pretty much stayed within the confines or easy reach of comfy civilization. Previously above, offering a brief description of the area we eventually met I wrote that going to and from the Zen man's abode was a very arduous several day trek, much of it through rugged and steep very high altitude territory with a good portion of the trail following along the side of a stream that was sometimes rushing and other times placid depending on the steepness or flatness of the terrain. Although Hope may not have been consciously aware of it, nor did she seem to be following any learned, formalized, laid out, or structured dictum, innately she was replicating a classical regimen with ancient roots emanating far back in the past that embraced perfection of the precepts (Sila), thoughts brought to a state of quiescence (Samadhi), diligent practice of the trances (Jhana), attaining toward insight (Prajna) and being a frequenter to and of lonely places. Hence then, where it was we crossed paths. Bill Morgan, in his 2010 tome sub-titled The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, wrote of Hope Savage, "She dreamed of escape, and the more remote and exotic the destination, the better." Except for a brief moment in passing one night where she told me something that went like, "It's nice to have an orgasm once in a while you don't have to do yourself," she seemed to be fairly satisfied with her life.[6]

As to her beauty so alluded to by others, although for the most part, except when necessary for other reasons, she was, because of the cold, covered head to toe and had on well worn boot-like footwear, she still was exquisite, moving with the grace of a ballerina both in hand gestures and movements across the ground. And, even though there were probably no beauty products for a 1000 miles around she needed none. As for Corso's comments regarding her memory and ability to recite fifty stanzas of Swinburne's The Triumph of Time, although no poetry was mentioned, it was easy to tell her mind overflowed with imagination, wit, and intellect. Through it all though, the exquisiteness, the beauty, the intellect, she seemed to me, just below the surface, just plane tired of it all.[7][8]

Our conversations, although not exclusively concentrated on things spiritual, they were not ignored, blocked, or even lightly sprinkled over the top, but more if anything, webbed dimensionally in all directions thoughout. And why shouldn't they? After all, Hope had left childhood environs behind not so much to leave something, but in a continuing growth sort of way, in search of something, with that something being blanketed by a deeper meaning of some kind. In an effort to establish context I told her I had been doing study-practice at the monastery and as a young boy done darshan under the auspices of the venerated Indian holy man Sri Ramana Maharshi. She shrugged it off almost as being unimportant. Unlike most of the others that followed in her footsteps such as Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass, et al, she viewed most of the esteemed holy men she had crossed paths with as being either charlatans, phonies, or looking for a quick marker not unlike Paul Brunton wrote about in his travels in India in the early 1930s. Re the following:

"One heard so much of certain so-called holy men who possessed repute of having acquired deep wisdom and strange powers; so one travelled through scorching days and sleepless nights to find them, only to find well-intentioned fools, scriptural slaves, venerable know-nothings, money-seeking conjurers, jugglers with a few tricks, and pious frauds."

It was one of the things that intrigued me about her. Yet there was more, although I was then and still unable to put my finger on it as well as being uncomfortable with the wording of the concept because it comes from a place within me before words are, but once formulated, one of the reasons she was so unreceptive to guru types. To me she seemed Awakened --- without being Enlightened --- most likely since birth or very early on, living with it her whole life and, although realizing there was difference between herself and others, not knowing what it was. I think that was the motivation of her continued search for an answer. Some people thought she was crazy, I thought otherwise.[9]

If alive Hope Savage, born in late 1936, would be into her 80s and any children born to her in the early 1970s bracket would be in their mid 40s.[10]

Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.

Adam Osborne, who grew up at the Ramana ashram from a toddler to just before being a teenager, told me that sometime prior to his father's death in 1970 a man by the name of William Samuel contacted him in the U.S. and expressed an interest in meeting his father. In their conversation Samuel told him that he and Osborne (the younger) had met at the Ramana ashram in India in 1944 and that during his stay, on the night of the full moon in April of that year, he, Osborne (the younger), his mother and another young boy he thought was Osborne's brother, went on a ritual walk around the holy mountain Arunachala.

In April of 1944 the moon was full on Saturday April 8th. That would put me still at the ashram proper in early April and putting the "boy" on the way home on board a ship in the Indian Ocean, by previous reckoning as figured out in British Ship MV Tulagi, toward the end of May, 1944 and most likely back in the states sometime in June, 1944.

According to the date Sam Savage put on his letter, May 2, 1963, and the contents therein as they relate to Hope, would put her almost exactly one year to the date ahead of Osborne's comments, with her in turn then, as referred to in other comments to Ginsberg, et al, in place to be on her way to the Himalayas.

The following has been extrapolated or pulled forward as it were, from Footnote [10] because of it's relevance here:

I know she had got far enough into Africa and Arabian Peninsula areas to have reached as far south as the port city of Aden, as well as Ethiopia, Iran and back to India, but that was all well before going into the Himalayas when I crossed paths with her. Referring back to Deborah Baker, previously cited, and her book Blue Hand she writes, and of which totally substantiates what I have presented albeit from a completely different unbiased source and what I have been saying all along:

"Upon returning to India that winter, she found her way to a remote and inhospitable valley in the western Himalayas."

Although a little off subject related to Hope Savage herself specifically, because of what I have presented regarding her within these pages, especially so how we met, there are those who come forward on occasion taking issue as to what I have cited as a Zen monastery, a monastery they take as being in Tibet --- with Zen and Tibet in their view not necessarily going hand-in-hand. In clarification, for those who may be so interested, the following is presented:

On the ancient Silk Road, of which I have made reference to and also called the Chamadao, the Tea Horse Trail or Tea Horse Road, and of which were or are all integral parts of the Silk Road, there is a place known as Dunhuang in northwestern China on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Sixteen miles southeast of Dunhuang is the Mogao Caves, a complex of some 700 or so caves dating back to 400 AD, perhaps before, carved out of the living rock above the Dachuan River. One after the other of the caves are adorned with Buddhist statuary and art, among them one cave specifically noted for having a hoard of manuscripts known as the Dunhuang Manuscripts discovered hidden and sealed away for well over a thousand years. The following is what Wiki writes on the manuscripts:

"By far the largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras, commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious merit. Several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen. Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist manuscripts has been on the Ch'an (or Zen) texts, which have revolutionized the history of Ch'an Buddhism."

There is a book titled TIBETAN ZEN: Discovering a Lost Tradition (2015) by Sam van Schaik based on his study of rare Tibetan manuscripts discovered among the hoard of manuscripts found in the aforementioned sealed cave. Taken together van Schaik's works offer a heretofore unknown window into the existence of a Tibetan Zen tradition that has not been known previously to scholars and laypeople alike, whether Tibetan, European, or Chinese. See:

When I was a young boy in the fourth or fifth grade or so two of my grade-school buddies and I used to pull a Radio Flyer through the alleys around the neighborhood collecting pop and beer bottles for the deposit. After we collected a wagon load we would turn them in various places around of which one was a bar. In the process of pounding on the back door I got to know the dishwasher there, an elderly (to me) Chinese man.

As a young boy without a lot of experience in the matter --- and never with my buddies --- I used to go by the bar and meditate in the alley with the old man even without the necessity of turning in soda or beer bottles for the deposit. Sitting in the shade on the back steps amongst the garbage cans and flies behind the bar one afternoon, while drinking hot tea out of tiny little cups with no handles in a near ritual-like tea ceremony he insisted on, the elderly Chinese man told me a story about the bombing of Japanese occupied Taiwan by B-29 Superfortresses of the United States Army Air Force during World War II. He said from ancient times there was a "girl Buddha" whose followers believed that reciting the same mantra that the Green Lama used, Om Mani Padme Hum, would, because of her compassion, deliver them from harm. He said even though he himself had not practiced or invoked the mantra, while seeking refuge in the midst of the attack he inadvertently ended up amongst a group of believers who were also running to find shelter from the explosions. Then, while within the group, most of whom were verbally repeating the mantra, overhead, pure white and almost cloud-like, the "girl Buddha" appeared in the sky above them actually deflecting the trajectory of the bombs away from their exposed path until they reached safety and out of harms way.

The mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, came up because of a 1940s comic book superhero called The Green Lama that used the mantra much like Billy Batson used Shazam to become Captain Marvel --- to invoke superpowers --- and, in the Green Lama's case, like Captain Marvel, gaining super strength, invulnerability, the ability to fly, and even being impervious to bullets to the point of being bulletproof. The old dishwasher had six or eight copies of the Green Lama, all in like-new mint condition, of which, for whatever reason, he gave to me.

During those back-alley sessions, if the Chinese man used any names relative to the "girl Buddha" I don't recall them. Anything I know about her other than his description of the protection she provided, I have garnered later in life. Basically the "girl Buddha," or more respectfully, female Buddha, is known as Kuan Yin (also know as Quan Shi Yin and Kwan Yin), a Chinese female incarnation of Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara) the Bodhisattva of Compassion. A bodhisattva is an Enlightened being who has decided to "stay in the world" rather than becoming a fully Enlightened Buddha and living a compassionate life for the sake of all beings. With the mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, Kuan Yin tirelessly attempts to deliver all beings from suffering.

It was not long after the war, with me still being a young boy, that I began traveling around the desert southwest with my Uncle and started interacting with Native Americans on a regular basis. It was during one of those same early travels that I first heard about and actually met Navajo code talkers. It was also at that same time I first heard about their neighbors, the Zuni.

The Zuni have a rich and varied history, especially when juxtaposed against indigenous tribes that have historically inhabited the same area. Many things are considered somewhat out of the norm when the Zuni are compared with their counterparts such as the Navajos and Pueblos. So too, as related to our purposes here, there is a legacy that the Zuni have an archaeological artifact that has script written in the Tibetan language, of which one segment has been translated as being Om Mani Padme Hum.(see)

"He laughed and spoke to me. It's interesting --- he had always spoke to me in Hindi, and my Hindi was very bad. In India there was always somebody translating. But on these other levels the transmission is in thought form, and then it comes out in whatever language you think in"

Before the full abilities of the thought exchange phenomenon faded into oblivion I brought up, considering his age, about the arduous trip back and forth through the mountains to and from the monastery for example, and how, even for me in my somewhat comparable youth and the physical condition that accompanies it, how difficult it was. What I garnered as a response was that I travel my way and he travels his way.

The next morning the Zen-man was gone. So too, neither was he to be found when I returned to his hut, although I did find a rolled up piece of cloth tied to the strap of my shoulder bag. Marked on the cloth, most likely done so from the burnt end of a wooden stick, were four Chinese cuneiform characters, one in each corner and, filling most of the center, the outline of some sort of a shape I didn't recognize.

When the four Chinese characters were deciphered they turned out to mean nothing more than colors: red, yellow, green and black. The outlined shape in the center remained a mystery and meant nothing to anybody who saw it. The mystery however, was solved on its own some 15 years later, a period time that found me living in the Caribbean island country of Jamaica, and was solved almost on the first day I arrived for what turned out to be a two year stay. So too was answered, before I left the island, my comment regarding how arduous the trip back and forth through the mountains was and his response that I travel my way and he travels his way.

The first part was answered right after leaving the airport to the train station. Almost immediately I saw a giant map of Jamaica and instantly I recognized the shape of the island as being the exact same shape the Zen-man drew on the cloth. Secondly, on my train ride through the cities and hinterland I saw all over, again and again the dominant colors of red, yellow, green and black in the graffiti adopted from the country of Africa and used by the Rastafarians in the graffiti that was plastered all over on almost every available open space. Those two eye-openers along with my experience high in the mountains with a Jamaican man of spells called an Obeah led to the meaning behind how the Zen-man traveled those so many years earlier as found in the following:

To outside observers such as Hope Savage and initially myself, the monastery was as she saw it 'what looked like ruins of what may have been a monastery at one time.' Every once in awhile a small handful of monks would exit the ruins from what would have been where the main door to the monastery would have been at one time. If I came out of my Nirodha state long enough upon their return to see where they went in the ruins, it was always empty with no signs of monks anywhere.

One day when some monks came out of the ruins I got up and followed them into the fields hoping to pull something, anything, out of the ground to eat. They didn't stop at any fields but continued on, I just didn't have the strength to keep up with them over any distance. However, when they returned a short time later, I returned, entering the monastery in a single file line right along with them. In doing so, as a double set of rough hewn wooden doors, which hadn't been there previously, closed behind me, I suddenly found myself inside of a fully functional Zen monastery. For additional clarification and insight into the phenomenon please see:

The second person is who brought forth from my deep past the feelings I so allude to, and of whom I met several years later, the two of us having met and traveling in Thailand together as she sought to enhance a spiritual need by venturing into the jungles of Asia and becoming a frequenter of lonely places in an ever expanding attempt to enhance a deepening Awareness.

"According to the Buddha and how the sutras are said to present it, to manifest or execute the abilities of Siddhis, a stringent regimen of meditation and concentration MUST meet certain levels of accomplishments. To reach such a level the meditator must be perfect in the precepts (Sila), bring his thoughts to a state of quiescence (Samadhi), practice diligently the trances (Jhana), attain to insight (Prajna) and be frequenter to lonely places."

Phyllis Davis, mentioned at the end of the previous footnote, Footnote [5], on a spiritual quest found herself in a position where she was confronted by the above precepts.

Unlike most, in an honest assessment of herself, Davis questioned if she could meet such criteria, that is, being masterful in Sila, Samadhi, Jhana, and Prajna and be frequenter to lonely places. However, as time passed and people in her life she cared for and loved began to come and go, some on a more-or-less permanent basis by pushing up daisies, she began reevaluating just where she was finding herself in the overall scheme of things. She eventually traveled to the jungles of Thailand to resolve the issue.

Hope's younger brother Samuel, growing up with her in the same family says, most likely reflecting back on her as well but speaking of himself, that he was "brought up on the dashing glories of the Romantic poets by his mother and on the scientific rationalism of Darwin by his father."(see) When she quit high school I still had a year or so left. Around that same time Gregory Corso describes her as a "female Shelley," able to "recite and feel ALL of Shelley." In those days, that is my high school years, for me, the closest I came to knowing anything about Shelley was that his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein, of which every Frankenstein movie that came out, at least the original Universal Studios released ones, I went to see, up to and including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley shows up along with Shelley early in the plot to Bride of Frankenstein, but, of Shelley himself and his works, I knew nothing.

PERCY SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY AND LORD BYRON
AS SEEN IN THE 1935 FILM THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

When I moved back to the southern California beach city of my early years to start high school after living with a foster couple in an inland city for a few years where it seemed a good part of the youth aspired toward being greasers --- with duck-tail haircuts, collar up leather jackets, and fighting after school with chains --- and where I actually worked part time in a what some people might consider somewhat seedy, a card club poker casino called the The Normandie Club, to an area where a good portion of the teenagers leaned toward proto-surfers, was quite a change.

For me however, by the time I reached my junior year on into my senior year I had long since morphed outside the fringes of high school haute cultures into more of a Maynard G. Krebs bohemian type, hanging out, at least after graduation, in places like the Iconoclast Coffee House on Wall Street in Redondo Beach or the Insomniac on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach.(see)

So too, those last two years, almost always found me hauling around an over the shoulder canvas pouch with a continuing series of notebooks a la Leonardo Da Vinci, sketching and writing a montage of all kinds of useless drivel along with several Zen books that, albeit mostly just at the end and post high school, I was able to pull out and quote extensively to anybody who would listen --- of which no one would.(see)

One of my closest high school buddies at the time, also on the fringes, had taken piano lessons most of his life and actually got so good at it that playing the piano became almost a second nature for him. Although he could read music, because of an almost innate ability to sensibly improvise playing the piano he loved modern jazz, especially as played by his jazz heroes of the day the Lou Levy Trio and Dave Pell Octet. Somewhere along the way I picked up a similar interest regarding jazz, and because of it and the fact that I knew who Lou Levy was unlike almost everyone else our age, we started hanging together. Although my buddy didn't know it, initially I really only knew who Levy was because he had been married to Maxene Andrews of the 1940s World War II singing group the Andrews Sisters, famous for their Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B as well as a number of others.

I attended several gigs with my buddy for both Levy and Pell during and just after high school. As well, even though we were under age, the two of us went to Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse at the foot of Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach to hear his All Stars and other groups regularly. Matter of fact, I even appear in a photo-shot of the inside of the Lighthouse used on one of Rumsey's early record albums, wearing one of my dad's way oversize for me sports jackets (in those days men were required to wear a jacket and tie to get in. Later I bought a three-piece corduroy suit).(see)

In any case, for one of my high school art classes, which was about the only classes I took in those days, I had to design an album cover, so I chose Howard Rumsey. At the time, the girl I was mostly inseparable from, a fellow artist and, although from a staid family, leaning toward a quasi-bohemian lifestyle as soon as she left her house, selected for her album cover Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. I can still remember to this day how little I knew about anything in those days. Here she was, someone I thought as a contemporary and she knew about Scheherazade and stuff like that and I had never heard of it.

To emphasize what I mean, in ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds, speaking of that exact same time period I write:

"Prior to the advent of the soaring '60s, that is, in the unenlightened middle-to-late '50s, I was a teenager growing up in automobile conscious southern California and owned an immaculately spotless early model Ford Woodie Wagon. Like most high school kids whose cars are a big part of their life, I spent enormous amounts of time maintaining and reworking mine in an exacting and meticulous standard never before dreamed of by the manufacturer. I scraped, sanded, smoothed, bleached, stained, and spar varnished the wood beyond the brightest of the brightwork on the most expensive yacht. There was such a depth of reflection to the wood that a person could hold their arm to the darkened inner door panels and see themselves with clarity to their armpit. The most important thing for me however, was the popularity the car provided during my high school years. I could cruise the beach and high school campus with my buddies and girls would literally clamor for a ride."

It is a good thing David Madden had a couple of years of college under his belt when he met 17 year old Hope Savage or he would have never been able to compete, I know I sure couldn't have.(see) For a more indepth coverage of those so above aforementioned high school years please see:

After we parted company it is my belief she decided to find out for herself. For all I know she found a home and is still there, remaining to this day at age 26 or so. She could have also gone for only a short time and still been able to show up in Lebanon and/or elsewhere a few years later even though personally I don't subscribe to the Lebanon and elsewhere stories as being valid. I know she had got far enough into Africa and Arabian Peninsula areas to have reached as far south as the port city of Aden, as well as Ethiopia, Iran and back to India, but that was all well before going into the Himalayas when I crossed paths with her. Referring back to Deborah Baker, previously cited, and her book Blue Hand she writes, and of which totally substantiates what I have presented albeit from a completely different unbiased source and what I have been saying all along:

"Upon returning to India that winter, she found her way to a remote and inhospitable valley in the western Himalayas."

As for kids being conceived, the gestation period, or raised in the environment existing in the hinterlands beyond the monastery walls after entering is something I have no knowledge of. How an infant or child would age to adulthood or how long it would take I can't say. There is no perception to the passage of time, but aging does occur. Once returning through the doors to the Samsara-side things are different. However, on the two of my excursions into the hinterlands beyond the monastery walls, that is, going to the farmhouse or to see the ancient man of Zen, I very rarely saw other people and only a smattering of structures --- and for sure I don't recall seeing any children. That is not to say it isn't so, only that what I was meant to see is what I saw.

RUDIMENTARY ENGLISH AND THE MAN FROM THE VILLAGE

Regarding the man who had a rudimentary use of English mentioned in the main text above. After I had been returned to the monastery from my sojourn to the Ramana ashram in India the Zen master brought him before me. Before he left I asked if he remembered the time I was in the village and he handed me a magazine, pointing out photos of western women. After a few back and forths he nodded yes that he remembered. I then asked him if, since that time had he seen or come in contact with that same or any western woman. He responded with the following as found in the source so cited:

"He said the woman had come into the town from the mountains heading away from the monastery and the village in the direction of the escarpment. She had left something with a villager she said was for the white monk and that the 'something' ended up in his hands and, although he didn't have it with him, he still had it. Then he said a few days later she was back in the village although this time going the other way toward the direction of the monastery or back into the mountains. After that he never saw her again."

When I finally had a chance to go to the village and retrieve what the western woman left for the white monk, it turned out to be no more than a folded over in fours piece of paper with a mid-size for the page fairly neat but unclear as to what it was drawing in the center. No words, no signature, no date, no initials. Unless the drawing was supposed to be a double entendre of some kind it didn't make much sense no matter which way I turned it and looked at it. The closest the drawing resembled anything to me in a Rorschach Test sort of way was a woman's vagina. If it had been drawn by Hope and intended for me, and that was what it was, then it might have some sense to it if it was related back to the few days we were in the mountains. If that was what it was, but referred somehow to some potential future event, then for sure I didn't get it. See:

Starting in late August 2005 to late September 2008, on and off in two widely separated yet combined events --- and not really sure if I would be good at anything relevant --- I volunteered for hurricane duty with the American Red Cross. After having done so I was deployed back and forth for weeks-and-weeks-and-weeks between four hurricanes starting first with Katrina then Rita, then a few years later, Gustav and Ike.

During my volunteer deployment for Hurricane Katrina followed immediately by Rita I was paired from almost the very beginning --- and throughout the rest of my deployment --- with a young woman a few years into her early 30s. Although the two of us had been put together in a team initially by pure happenstance, after we worked side-by-side day and night week after week and got to know each other, we made certain thereafter that we were always paired together in some fashion, even to the point that when we re-upped for Rita after Katrina we did so as a pair.

In the beginning volunteers were coming in from all over and teams were haphazardly being thrown together by people who didn't know what they were doing any more than we did but had clipboards. I was sent to a hotel to seek out the person who was to be in charge of the group I was to be assigned to. There were supposed to be 12 of us, two teams of six so we could rotate shifts, but there were only six total available of which I was one. It was night and the group was sitting around the hotel pool patio hoping for more arrivals and transportation. Although we eventually got transportation, three rental cars, which were like gold, the powers that be thinking there would be 12 of us, no more arrivals showed up. At least for our team, with only six or us it meant two to a car and room for our junk. In the meantime the young lady of whom I speak, although I had never seen her before, had availed herself of the pool and was just climbing out to come to the table when I was walking up.

I was hit immediately by the fact that she had a near duplicate look to Botticelli's Birth of Venus that depicts the goddess Venus arriving at the shore after her birth, having emerged from the sea fully-grown. Secondly, being hit by the thought of duplicates, I almost fell over because she was a breath taking near perfect mirror image of what I remembered of Hope Savage --- and, if such things were possible, could have easily been stamped out of the same mold that Hope Savage had been back in the day.

As our three week deployment grew to six and beyond, in general discussions over time, among other things, it came out that prior to hurricane duty she had basically been hanging her hat, temporarily at least, at her uncle's place in Wisconsin, in all places, Madison. She also told me, although an American, she was actually born abroad because at the time of her birth her mother was travelling in the Far East or Middle East, or as she put it, some such place.

We eventually ended up assigned to a Red Cross Service Center in Austin. In Austin on our time off we watched the bats fly out from under the bridge a few times at sundown and went to San Antonio for a couple of days. Took in the River Walk and rode the little boats in the canal and toured the Alamo. What happened to her when we were done with Rita I have no clue. Except for a selfie photo she sent one day maybe a year or so later via a now no longer active e-mail address that showed her by a waterfall with her long locks sheared off as if she did it herself with scissors that was it.
For more on the hurricanes, Red Cross, et al, please see:

As a teenager in high school, mostly because of the restoration efforts on my Ford Woodie Wagon, I met and became friends with one of the top Ferrari and Maserati sports car racing mechanics around, a man by the name of Joe Landaker who just happened to like the woodie and my work on it. During those years he was the chief mechanic for a couple of the top racing teams in the country, Tony Parravano and John Edgar Enterprises. One day I was hanging out in his shop like I did once in awhile when the movie actor Steve McQueen and a buddy came in looking to possibly buy one of the race cars. With McQueen concentrating on Landaker specifically it sort of left me and his buddy outside the conversation, so the two of us began a bit of small talk. In the process I told him I thought the tan three piece corduroy suit he had on looked pretty sharp. He said he would sell it to me for 10 bucks. I said OK and with that he started taking off his suit right then and there in the shop, shirt, tie, everything clear down to his underwear. Except for the ten bucks all he wanted was the pants and shirt I had on. We exchanged clothes, he left with McQueen and I had a ten dollar corduroy suit.

"A few days later, without the merchant marine knowing about it, I went down to the public library in Veterans Park and asked one of the librarians where I could find some books on Freud, pronouncing his name as it looked when written, 'Frooed,' rhyming with food. The librarian asked 'Who?' and again I said 'Frooed, Frooed,' showing her the slip of paper. By then several other libraians had gathered around, and one of them laughing, said, 'Oh, the boy means Freud' (rhyming with 'froid') with all of the others soon joining in laughing and pointing at me like I was some kind of a dolt. I ran out of the library as fast as I could, but before I even reached the bottom of the steps one of the librarians caught me and talked me into coming back. She sat me down at one of the tables way in the back by myself and brought me a whole bunch of books and information of Freud. On and off throughout the afternoon and up until the library closed she went over them with me. As much as I read that day and as much as she tried to explain it all to me I still didn't get or figure out just what an ego was. It wasn't until a year later or so when a movie came out called Forbidden Planet that it all started to make sense. In the movie the main villain was a creation of the mind, a monster from the Id. The Id was part of the triad Freud proposed along with the ego and superego --- and suddenly it all made sense, except that is, why the Navy man insisted there was NO ego. That information was destined for later."

What is relevant here is my mention of the 'circular sky chart I invariably carried with me.' The sky chart was a flat paper card-stock device about 8 or 10 inches square with a circular wheel that could be turned and in the process, show the position of the stars and constellations at any given time. I still have the same chart and even though it remains a faithful standby I no longer carry it with me on my travels having been semi-superseded by a Night Sky i-Pad app, albeit in those days, I always had it amongst my stuff.

Although everybody reading this might not agree, the paragraphs in the rest of this footnote presents probably the most important thing ever written about the existence of Gyanganj, Shambhala or Shangri-La in modern times. In Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery the following is found:

"(B)ut on nights between the clouds or without clouds, so many stars seemed to blank out the night sky you could hardly make out any constellations."

While at the monastery I spent many a cold night meditating outside and on occasion pondering the stars. One night, having a familiarity and strong working knowledge of astronomy it dawned on me because whatever the time difference that occurred or didn't occur inside the walls where I was and that of the outside world --- unless it was a mind game --- there would have to be a difference in star position, if by nothing else the 26,000 year precession of the poles, however slight or minor, between the two. From that difference, if there was one, one's place in time could then possibly be determined.

After passing through the doors into the monastery I went around to the outside front of the monastery and measured off a respectful distance and spent several nights observing the stars and taking note of their positions. After so many days I exited through the monastery doors to the outside world and measured off the exact same distance, sitting in what would duplicate the same spot, again spending several nights observing the stars and taking note of their position. When someone took notice I was doing 'something' I was strongly and harshly reprimanded by the Master and in so many non-understandable words told to cease and desist.

I never did a formal follow up. However, unscientific as what I did was, using my sky chart, fixed mountain peaks relative to the rising and setting of stars, position of the circumpolar constellations, etc., I did observe quite dramatically so, a parallax --- a parallax position-movement similar to what occurs when looking at a close object and blink one eye as opposed to the other and the difference of apparent movement because of bifocal vision --- the implication being an actual physical time-frame reference difference between the two realms. To my knowledge, relative to the existence of Gyanganj, Shambhala or Shangri-La, in the history of the world, I am the only person to have ever done such a thing.

BELOW IS THE LONG TIME PREVIOUS FOOTNOTE THAT APPEARED HERE FOR YEARS LEADING UP TO HIS PASSING:

It is not known if Hope Savage's brother Samuel is or is not still alive. According to an article in the publication Numero Cinq in February 2016 Sam Savage entered hospice "for his final days," complicated by a blood disease suffered by him for decades called "alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency." See:

It seems like my Uncle had always been around. However, that wasn't really always the case. While it is true he was more-or-less a steady full time guardian for me during my early formative years, say just before I was eight years old until shortly after I turned twelve, basically overlapping and during the same period of time my father and Stepmother were married, he was more than just simply being around or a babysitter. Besides being a fairly well established artist in the desert southwest with strong ties to the indigenous populations that inhabited the area, he was as well what I call a biosearcher, even to the point of having several plant species named after him.

During those formative years of my life, albeit always under the ever watchful eye of my stepmother and her then never ending supply of money, she spared little or no expense to see to it we got whatever we wanted, as long as it was within reason and made sense. What was unusual about all of that was sometimes what my stepmother viewed as being within reason and making sense was sometimes more wayout than what my uncle and I thought would be. So said, he was given complete authority to oversee me as he so chose, as long as I received extensive education in the sciences, hard academics, philosophy, and the arts and as well as he saw it, travel. In the end it was my stepmother who picked up the tab on all of our expenses and adventures. It was she who gave the final yes or no to any wild scheme my uncle or I cooked up. And it was she who had the power and ability to pull the strings to get us out of anything of an undue nature we may have accidentally got caught up in.

A few years before my uncle died he embarked on a personal expedition to explore the Vortexes said to be associated with Machu Picchu high in the Andes of South America. Afterwards he traveled over to the Brazilian side to bio-search the vine banisteriopsis caapi, associated with the Ayahuasca, the Sorcerer's Brew, along the upper reaches of the Amazon when he broke his leg. Returning to the States, weak from the complications of that break, with dementia sneaking in and his body defenses down, cancer took over and he died a couple of years later at age eighty-six. In a large part it was because of his intimate knowledge of southwest indigenous plants that I, starting as not much more than a mere ten-year old boy, but mostly less, ended up exploring a good part of the desert with him.

Among other things for example, because of that same intimate knowledge, the famed astronomer, meteorite hunter and mathematician Dr. Linclon La Paz sought him out for assistance. La Paz's idea, as explored more thoroughly in the article on Frank Edwards, was, because of the controversy that continued to escalate in the minds of a few surrounding the so-called Roswell Incident was to have my uncle help find out if and where any of the plant growth on the suspected debris field related to the incident may have been moved, removed, replanted, tampered with or altered in some fashion and if possible determine the flight trajectory of the suspected airborne object, all of which was done by the way

Secondly, in another example, and a major one at that, found at the source so cited, as in the above, relates to my uncle and thus then back to me --- the biosearcher he was and the ward of his I was, having been pinpointed as the mysterious informant mentioned so prominently by Carlos Castaneda in his series of Don Juan books:

"Deep in the desert southwest, before Carlos Castaneda met the Shaman-sorcerer that became famous in his series of Don Juan books, Castaneda had a chance encounter with a somewhat mysterious hallucinogenic bio-searcher and mushroom hunter from the Taos, Santa Fe, New Mexico area. It has been chronicled that the bio-searcher, known only as the informant in various Castaneda writings, some written by Castaneda himself, some by others, and some even written by those not always sympathetic toward Castaneda, agree for the most part --- unsympathetic or not --- that the informant was the actual person that FIRST introduced Castaneda to the rituals and use of medicinal plants."

As found in The Roswell Ray Gun, without telling anybody, my uncle had returned from his trip to South America early because of having not only broken his leg, but, if not just flat-out fatigued, he was weak and ill as well from some undiagnosable jungle rot. The instant I was informed of his situation by his long time doctor I left for my uncle's home in Santa Fe to see him. It was only then I discovered he was actually on a serious downhill trajectory. I knew a huge fund of otherwise unknown or purposely withheld information would no longer be able to tapped when his mind disappeared and he was gone. He always seemed so together and wise, but in those last few years I could see him slipping and I knew there were many, many things that would go unanswered when the time came.

As I was sitting next to my pretty much bed ridden uncle as he was inching towards the end of his days we continually jumped back and forth between conversational subjects. In that my uncle knew Allen Ginsberg, I had brought up Hope Savage when all of a sudden, after a brief mention of the Meteor Crater for one reason or the other, he asked me to retrieve several books from his jumble of shelved, piled, and scattered around stacked books on what was called the Carolina Bays.

The Carolina Bays are an inline series of closely associated rather large seemingly non-natural geophysical landforms with no known, or at the very least, controversial, origin. Although there are supposedly thousands of them of varying sizes strewn all along the Atlantic coastline and inland a bit from as far north as New Jersey to Florida in the south, a great proportion of them are so large, especially in the Carolinas, that until they were seen from the air for the first time no one had put them together as possibly having come from or formed by the same phenomenon. Some people think they are impact craters from a comet or meteor.

"On that apocalyptic day a large meteor streaked across the northern polar regions. It skimmed low across Quebec, before ploughing into the Laurentide ice sheet that covered the Great Lakes region, creating an enormous elliptical crater in the ice. The displaced ice from this hyper-velocity impact was fractured and crushed into a fine paste, and blobs of this icy material were ejected at ultra-velocity up though the atmosphere and into a ballistic arc down towards their target regions. Millions of these slushballs of uniform teardrop shape, but widely varying sizes, splattered in two giant wings across central and eastern North America, forming clusters of identical elliptical impact depressions orientated towards the Great Lakes area. Thus only 12,900 years ago, the entire eastern half of North America was completely obliterated, and the world was plunged into a little Ice Age."

Others vehemently discount the possibility. My uncle and I have always subscribed to the impact side of things, that's why when Meteor Crater came up so close in conversation with the mention of Hope Savage it rang a bell for my uncle, the biosearcher that he was, particularly when he related it to the drawing Hope gave me. The drawing was not of a woman's vagina per se', but a Venus fly trap, albeit a double entendre --- sort of --- all of which I was eventually able to figure out thanks to my uncle sitting next to him while he was on his death bed.

Notice in the four graphics just below that the top left one describes the natural habitat area for the Venus flytrap, that being the states of North and South Carolina. On that same graphic the location of the city of Columbus in South Carolina is clearly marked. If you recall, Hope Savage was from Camden, not far from Columbus, Columbus being were she first showed up relative to her history. Notice too, in the graphic next to it, top right, it shows where the debris from the impact fell, if not creating the Carolina Bays, at least falling in the exact same area where they are --- and is well, the exact same area that is the natural habitat for the Venus flytrap.

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So, what's the point? One of the books my uncle had me bring him related to the Carolina Bays was titled "The Mysterious Carolina Bays" written by none other than Hope Savage's father Henry Savage. The Venus flytrap in Hope's drawing that I mistakenly took as a drawing of a vagina, which I'm sure was done so by her on purpose, hence the double entendre aspect of it all, was some kind of a huge cryptic message, a huge cryptic message that was either never followed through on by Hope or I didn't get, or both.